A
good sign: you slide a new cd into your stereo, from a band of which you've heard good things, but don't know much about, and 30 seconds into the first track, you're hooked. And then the second track kicks in, and (
oh my god!) the hook is yanked so hard, you know it's embedded deep, and you'll gladly never be able to pull it out.
The CD:
Sun Kil Moon's
Ghosts of the Great Highway.
The hook and gig: "Glen Tipton" and "Carry Me Ohio."
Sun Kil Moon is actually just the latest of showcases for
Mark Kozelek, perhaps best known for his work with
Red House Painters. I had always heard of Painters with interest, as they're known for a style some have labeled slowcore, or maybe sadcore — melancholy, emotional, atmospheric — and, for reasons we don't need to explore now, many of my favorite albums are guilty of these same features. But even after all these years, I had never actually heard a Painters album. I think I've greatly missed out.
The sound of
Ghosts fits my impression of what the Painters would sound like, adding perhaps a tinge of frontier tone, hinted at by the album cover. In addition to Kozelek, Painter's drummer Anthony Koutsos also participates, as well as another drummer, Tim Mooney from fellow sadcore band
American Music Club, and Geoff Stanfield of
Black Lab.
Back to those first two imprinting tracks, I had a difficult time initially getting much further into the album, I kept wanting to listen to them again and again. Acoustic guitar initializes the ballad-like "Glen Tipton," and Kozelek's distinctive vocals immediately merge in with a longing melody. Kozelek's vocals are a critical component of the Sun Kil Moon experience — a haunting, slightly rough but soothing tenor. Even better to realize later that the lyrics aren't ballad-like at all, more a collection of images that evoke reflection, including references to, yes,
Judas Priest guitarists in the process (
Cassius Clay was hit more than Sonny Liston / some like KK Dowling more than Glen Tipton / some like Jim Nabors, some Bobby Vinton / I like them all). Then onto "Carry Me Ohio," a sweet, loping breakdown-of-a-relationship song (
can't count to / all the lovers I've burned through / so why do I still burn for you / I cannot say).
The album really needs to be considered as a whole, though, rather than through the individual songs. Because in the end, it's the continual mood that makes the biggest impression. The rest of the album continues in the vein of the first two tracks, with only the practically rocking "Lily and Parrots" standing out, almost jarring in context. And the intra-structure of the songs tend to follow the same macro-structure of the album: content to generate a steady mood on the strength of a few phrases. Delving deeper, this repetition and variation appears in other guises throughout the album: references to boxers (Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston previously mentioned, the 14-and-a-half-minute "Duk Koo Kim" takes its title from the tragic South Korean
boxer); variations on the phrase (
come to me my love / one more night) appear in several different songs; and the album ends with "Pancho Villa," in actuality an acoustic version of track 3, "Salvador Sanchez," which tells the story of — wait for it — another
tragic boxer, who also died in 1982.
As much as I love the mood of the album, great for post-midnight reading or autumn Sunday afternoons drinking coffee, the steadyness does cause the songs to start to merge together by the end of the album, which keeps me from giving a higher rating than I might have, even though I know intellectually that that's probably part of the intent. But I do know that I'm finally going to have to search out more Red House Painters and Kozelek albums (especially the curious
What's Next to the Moon, an entire album of reinterpretations of
AC/DC lyrics Kozelek released a few years ago).
